I've found that I'm the kind of person who really loves games with a hub world that grows along with the protagonist's adventure.

There's something really emotionally compelling about the smallish world of Crystal Chronicles where you can reasonably learn the names of everyone in your home town and visit some of the same cities with familiar faces on your trip every other in-game year or so.

I'm trying to figure out a name for a genre of story where you end up going from one destination to another, getting only a superficial look at each place you visit, like Star Wars or Kingdom Hearts.

I was going to call it "Road Trip", but I'm leaning more to calling it a "Cruise", since that evokes the passive, tourist-y feeling that bugs me about that kind of narrative. I want to think there's more nuance to a road trip than that.